The present invention relates to a device used to retract the tissue of the body of a patient during surgery. More specifically, the present invention relates to a retractor that facilitates enlarging a surgical cavity and providing access to a surgical site.
Invasive surgical procedures require a surgeon to create an incision in the patient's skin in order to access the area within the patient's body where the surgery must be performed. It is desirable for the surgeon to create a small incision because a smaller incision takes less time to heal and thus causes less trauma to the patient. The incision, however, must be large enough to accommodate the surgeon's tools necessary to perform the surgery. Thus, retractors are often used to hold open incisions in order to hold a patient's skin wide open for surgery and prevent the skin from entering the surgery area while the surgeon operates his or her tools.
Retractors as known in the art typically consist of two opposing prongs that enter into an incision and extend away from each other in order to pull the skin of the patient back into a large opening. These retractors pose two problems: the opening created by the retractor is an elongated opening that is usually not large enough to accommodate a plurality of surgical tools, and there is no protection of the skin from the surgical area which may lead to the slippage of surgical tools on to the skin of the patient. Thus, a need exists for a surgical retractor that provides a large surgical work area from a small incision and creates a boundary between the surgical area and the patient's skin.
The present invention addresses these needs by facilitating a larger surgical cavity for surgery through a smaller incision which minimizes tissue trauma. This minimally-invasive approach provides faster patient rehabilitation than traditional incision and retraction techniques.
The various embodiments of the present invention are particularly useful for orthopedic surgery of the spine, but are envisioned to be limitlessly applicable to other surgical techniques and other parts of the body.